so i've been licensed about two years now and finally got around to actually participating in one of the county ARES exercises rather than just showing up to the meetings and nodding along. figured i'd share some stuff that caught me off guard because honestly nobody really warned me about any of this.

the scenario was a simulated earthquake, shelters activating across three counties and we had to establish comms between the EOC and like four or five red cross sites. sounds simple enough right. except the very first thing that happened was the guy assigned to the main EOC radio had a family thing come up and just... wasn't there. so suddenly the net control job got handed to someone who hadnt really prepared for that role and you could kind of feel everyone waiting a little too long between transmissions, not totally sure of the message format we were supposed to use.

also i had no idea how much paper would be involved. i know ICS forms exist, i've seen them, but actually routing a written message through proper channels while also trying to maintain a net felt like patting your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time. dropped a few things, had to ask for repeats more than i'd like to admit.

the part that actually went well was packet — we had two guys running winlink check-ins from the shelter sites and that worked better than voice for the resource requests, less chance of mishearing numbers and names. anyway curious if other people have run into the same issues at their drills, especially the backup personnel thing, that seemed like a big gap to me

yeah the backup personnel thing is probably the most common gap in almost every ARES group i've been involved with, and ive been doing this since the late 90s. everyone practices their own assigned role and then one person doesn't show and the whole thing gets shaky. what i've pushed for in our group is that at least two or three people can credibly run net control, not just one designated person. we do a thing where we rotate who runs the weekly nets specifically so people get reps in a low stakes environment before it matters.

the ICS paperwork thing is real too. theres a reason served agencies drill on that stuff constantly and we sometimes treat it like a checkbox. if you havent done it under any kind of simulated pressure the forms feel way more complicated than they are. the good news is it does get smoother. first time i handled a ICS-213 traffic message in a real activation i definitely had to look at my cheat sheet twice.

sounds like a solid first drill though, the fact that you noticed those gaps means youre paying attention to the right stuff.

the packet point is interesting, we've been going back and forth in our group about whether to lean harder into winlink for shelter comms or stick with voice for everything because some of the older members dont really trust it. personally i think voice and digital both have their place, like you said for resource requests with numbers and names winlink is just cleaner. less room for phonetic alphabet confusion at 2am when everyone's tired.

did your group do any kind of after action review? that's something we started doing after every exercise and honestly it changed how useful the drills feel, like even just 20 minutes talking through what broke before everyone packs up and goes home makes a big difference the next time around.